​Next week marks 12 months since the UK first went into lockdown to reduce the spread of COVID-19.  A whole year since many of us have set foot in the workplace; congregated in busy meeting rooms and crowded conferences or chatted freely with colleagues over lunch. ​

As we reflect on everything that has changed and the 125,000 people who have lost their lives, most people would agree that the pandemic has a huge impact on our workplace wellbeing, both physically and mentally. But what has this got to do with social value? And what learnings can we take from the pandemic to improve workplace wellbeing in the future? ​

It's been 12 months since we've been able to meet and work together in person.

​What role does wellbeing play in social value? ​

One of the mistakes many businesses make when they start thinking about social value is believing that it’s about creating value for the whole of society.  It’s not.  That’s the public sector’s job. 

If you’re a private sector organisation, good social value is about thinking about how you operate and what the non-economic value you can create for your own stakeholders as part of your operations. These stakeholders can be external customers, such as the communities you serve or the people living in the places where you operate, but they also include internal stakeholders - one of the most important groups of which is your staff.  

​Workplace wellbeing is an essential piece of the social value puzzle. ‘Good health and wellbeing’ is one of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals and it’s also one of five key themes that the Government is majoring on when it comes to evaluating social value. The public sector now specifically asks suppliers to demonstrate how they will support the health and wellbeing of the contract workforce at the bidding stage, which means for companies who rely on the public sector for a large part of their business, how they treat their staff really matters.   

What is wellbeing?

So what is wellbeing? During the pandemic, the term ‘wellbeing’ became synonymous with mental health and was a top priority for many employers - understandably so.  Almost one in five adults in the UK have experienced some form of depression during the pandemic and research from Deloitte found that 38 percent of workers felt that lockdown had a negative impact on their wellbeing.  

However, while mental health of employees should remain a key focus as we all recover from the long-term effects of the pandemic, we must also understand that wellbeing is about much more than just happiness and mental health. It’s also about things like:

• how satisfied people are with their lives;
  
• their sense of purpose; and
  
• how in control they feel.  
  

When you think about it like this it's clear the key role  jobs have to play on personal wellbeing.  

9 factors that impact workplace wellbeing
In its ‘Wellbeing at Work’ factsheet, the CIPD outlines many factors that impact on workplace wellbeing including:

1.  A good and safe working environment
2.  Supportive line management
3.  Good leadership
4.  Realistic work demands
5.  Autonomy in the workplace
6.  Fair pay, good ethical standards
7.  Diversity and inclusion
8.  Career development opportunities
9.  Financial wellbeing.  

The commercial value of looking after employee’s wellbeing 

It's not just a moral argument;  there is also a strong economic argument for supporting employee wellbeing.   
​
Unhappy staff take time off sick, resign, are less productive and can create a toxic workplace culture which can affect other staff, impact the service you can provide to your customers and prevent other people wanting to work for you.  Even in 2018, 57% of working days lost could be accounted to work-related stress, depression or anxiety and research by Oxford Economics estimated that employers lose £30,000 for every employee they have to replace through recruitment costs, loss of output, staff time and other fees.  
Yet data on staff sickness and retention is also just the tip of the iceberg. There are also lots of longer-term and less tangible benefits to promoting wellbeing in the workplace, such as better employee engagement and morale, a happier and productive workforce, a more inclusive culture and the ability to attract the best talent.  

What have we learned during the pandemic? ​

One positive to come out of the pandemic is that attitudes about wellbeing have started to change. It’s allowed us to see our colleagues and employees as human beings and have a better insight into their personal lives, which has led organisations to take a more individual approach to wellbeing. 
In the past, workplace wellbeing was often an ambiguous term used for blanket events or initiatives like giving out free fruit or allowing employees to have their birthday off as annual leave - things that are easy to quantify and read nicely in annual reports and job adverts. When thrown into a national crisis, these initiatives no longer had value.  
The pandemic has laid bare that just like social value, a good wellbeing strategy isn’t a tick-box exercise; it’s an approach to ‘how you do things’ that should be holistic, practical, relevant and impactful. Wellbeing is the undercurrent of any organisation’s culture and should be embedded deep within its approach to communication, training and management.   

Who can we learn from? 

It’s clear that organisations that already had a more proactive, holistic and agile approach to wellbeing were able to respond more quickly and effectively when lockdown struck. 
Within the first few weeks, Virgin Media had redeployed any engineers who they’d identified as being vulnerable to homebased customer service roles and provided them with remote training. They also offered all staff regular video sessions on managing mental health, anxiety, financial stability and faith, while managers worked hard to support those who needed extra support due to caring responsibilities and other home pressures. The message to employees was that their psychological safety was just as important as their physical safety and the aim was to foster a sense of belonging and community amongst staff. 

Belonging was also a key theme for Ernst & Young in the UK. The company used a range of listening tools to monitor staff wellbeing including surveys and a “mood tracker”. These insights helped to create better experiences for people by responding to their needs which included extra childcare provision and an increased demand for training via the company’s online learning platform. EY UK say that they are now looking at these experiences to help inform different, more agile ways of working in the future. 

Other organisations have also found that initiatives started in response to the pandemic have had a more long-term positive impact and will likely continue in the future. In the first lockdown, ABB Electrification launched an informal weekly touchpoint called “Diamonds & Pearls” to encourage staff to take a break from their day-to-day workload and simply check in on each other. 

Mia Claselius, Head of Communications, comments: “Even though the initiative began as an effort to ensure the personal wellbeing of those in my team, it’s had a positive impact on our working relationships, strengthening team spirit and even enabling increased collaboration. By sharing stories, discussing what’s on our mind and listening to each other, D&P has helped us forge meaningful connections and support one another. D&P continues to be a highlight of the week for many, myself included, and is an initiative I’d highly recommend to all leaders.” 

Giving employees ownership  

The common theme in these examples is that the most successful initiatives were shaped by the people they intended to benefit. While it’s important for senior management to be seen to be invested, involved in and leading any wellbeing strategy from the top-down, if workers feel as though they have some ownership in the ideas then they are much more likely to engage.  

Ultimately ‘wellbeing’ is a very individual thing. For some employees, feeling a sense of wellbeing is simply about being allowed to get on with their job with a manageable workload. For others it is seeing their values reflected in the workplace or having their professional or personal development actively supported.    ​

Deborah Grossman, Wellbeing at Work Programme Manager at The Wee Retreat in Glasgow, told us: “The key to making it work is to take the time to really listen to what your staff want and be open to it potentially changing how you do business. Our ethos is to make wellbeing part of every day and encourage management to model best practice.” 

Building a better workforce 

What’s important now is that we build on these lessons and start to consider the broader wellbeing picture as we return to the office. ‘Workplace wellbeing’ shouldn't just be a Covid sticking plaster but the start of us building back better. 

lf you ask most companies what their greatest asset is, they’ll reply that it’s their people, but how well their take care of that asset remains up for debate. If we continue to think of employees as the people who we just see between the hours of 9am and 5pm then we are missing out on the full potential of that person and subsequently the full potential of our collective workforce. 

The effects of Covid are seismic and organisations that are slow to react or fail to prioritise workforce wellbeing will find themselves facing questions and criticism from shareholders and stakeholders alike, not to mention a steady flow of resignation letters. Workplace wellbeing is not just about empathy and kindness. It also makes commercial sense. 

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